


Clover Hill

by scioscribe



Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-28
Updated: 2013-03-28
Packaged: 2017-12-06 18:39:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/738857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Men who live on Clover Hill will always try to hire Boyd Crowder to do their dirty work for them.  It's just that in this universe, one of those men is Raylan Givens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Clover Hill

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to norgbelulah and Thornfield Girl for their help on this!

There were two kinds of rich men in the world, Boyd Crowder thought, those who were never out of their custom-tailored suits and those who were never out of their pastel polo shirts: Raylan Givens, thank the Lord for the very smallest of favors, was the former kind of man. Boyd didn’t know that he could have abided a man wealthy enough to not have to strut a little.

Givens favored cool shades of gray and pinstripes light as chalk, the kind that tricked his already long lines into looking even longer, making the man into an optical illusion of expansiveness.

Boyd, in deference to tender Clover Hill sensibilities, had buttoned his shirt up to the top button, hiding the ink on his chest, and his shoes were freshly shined.

“You want a drink?”

So he was the kind of rich man who would wear a suit but feel comfortable enough to loosen his grammatical tie at his own front door. Boyd collected facts, and when it came to Clover Hill and the men who lived there, he hoarded them. Knowledge was the only thing in the world with a hope of balancing out money and even it accumulated into value slowly, like each day’s pocket change clinking into a bowl.

“From the kind of man who keeps his liquor in crystal decanters?” Boyd smiled. “I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.”

So he got his drink. Givens even had his own, which was something of a surprise: Boyd had counted on him being generous enough to pour but not uncaring enough to drink with him.

“I could tell you your life story, Mr. Crowder,” Givens said, “to prove that I know the kind of man you are and the kinds of things you’re capable of doing. Some of which I’d be in the way of meaning positively. But we can skip all the bullshit, if it’s all the same to you, and I can just say what I asked you here for.”

“Oh, but it’s not often a boy from the holler makes his way up the hill,” Boyd said. “I’d just as soon you take your time. But if you’d rather rush, throw in a little more casual profanity to convince me we’re all just men of the world here, I’d prefer you called off your man at the door.”

Givens smiled and twitched his fingers: the insistent itch of someone’s gaze on the back of Boyd’s neck went away.

“You’re not bad,” Givens said.

“Well, if that were true, that would be a shame, Mr. Givens, because it seems to me that bad is just what you’re looking for.”

“Bad but discreet.”

“I don’t kiss and tell.”

“We’re not talking about kissing.”

“It’s a euphemism,” Boyd said. “Which tells you I’ll be tight-lipped enough about our business not even to name it here.”

Though kissing had been one of two ways, in time out of mind, for men and women in Harlan to go from holler to hill: Boyd had known a girl in high school, pretty, hair the kind of pinkish blonde that got called strawberry when it was really the color of sunrise, who’d bedded half of Clover Hill, men and boys alike, for invitations to their dances where she’d stand in the dresses they bought her and smoke, pretending to be from out of town, while they danced with other girls. And there had been a boy then, too, all freckles, who’d attached himself to a man, gotten clipped on his wrist like a watch, with no one close enough kin to him to know what he was going and tell him that that man went through holler boys like other men went through Kleenex. Everyone who went up the hill by kissing came down crying, and that without exception.

Boyd had other ascents in mind.

“Tight lips are a virtue,” Givens said, but what he meant by that was what all Clover Hill men meant: lips tight enough to keep secrets but not tight enough that he stinted on saying “yes” when he got asked his question.

Mags Bennett had told him something like that, when he’d been growing up, bumming around her store with Cousin Johnny and his brother, stealing money from their daddies’ dresser drawers to buy her apple pie: “You ask a whore down at Audrey’s how she knows it’s a Clover Hill fella she had in her mouth night before last instead of somebody from the holler or from out-of-the-way, and she’ll tell you: there’s no way he let her up off her knees without her swallowing every drop.”

Then, they’d all still been young enough that that kind of talk was only ever meant as a joke among them—of the three, only Boyd had divested himself of virginity, and that hastily—and after a bit, Cousin Johnny had laughed, his face red to the ears, and Mags had tapped him hard across the back of the head with the flat of her hand. They were all Mags’s boys to beat, though she had plenty of her own, and a wallop from her wasn’t anything unusual or fit for crying over: they took it from her in better spirits and with more love than they took it from their daddies over the stolen money.

“You’re a fool, Johnny Crowder, you think that’s anything other than the truth.” She’d looked at Boyd steadily and said to him, “Your brother didn’t laugh ‘cause he’s too young and too dumb to know whether he wants to shit or go blind, but you just play things close to the vest, I’d say.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Boyd had said.

“There are days I’d trade two of my tads for a boy like you,” she’d said, and poured him another glass of her apple pie, on the house this time. “When you get a little older, you come find me if you’re ever hard up for work. Not that I see you going hungry much. Empty-chambered either, come to that.”

Mags Bennett had likely never crossed paths with Raylan Givens, the son of a man who’d been such a legendary son-of-a-bitch in his business that men who worked for him ended up going over to Noble’s Holler thinking Limehouse or the like would sell them voodoo dolls of him instead of just kicking their asses up around their ears for them. Arlo Givens had owned Bo Crowder, when Boyd’s daddy had been alive; now Raylan Givens wanted to own Boyd. Wherever they were, high or low, they were still in Harlan County, where no one was trusted unless you could trip over three generations of his family’s headstones somewhere close by.

Which brought him back to Raylan Givens, whose life story he could have told, and more easily and fluently—he was sure—than Raylan could have told his.

Boyd was prepared to be bought by him—he’d done more for worse, and more cheaply—but he was not prepared to stay bought at whatever terms Givens would give him today.

“Just so we’re clear,” he said, “this business—it is business, Mr. Givens.”

“Your father dealt in favors.”

“My daddy was interested in Harlan.”

“And you’re interested in—”

“The world.”

“Then,” Givens said slowly, “it’s something longer-term you’d be interested in. I had only the one question in mind to ask today.”

“One job well-done often leads to another. You wouldn’t have someone paint your house to your satisfaction only to go hiring elsewhere next time it needed doing, would you?”

“How many people,” Givens said, “do you imagine I’d want dead?”

Boyd was glad they had made their way through obscurity to the point at hand, though he imagined Givens was watching him closely to see whether or not he would blink at the suggestion of gunplay. He did not. “A man of your status and station, I should think, would have enemies, though not all of them would have to be dealt with so conventionally. Deterrents take all forms, Mr. Givens, but I am flexible, and I take those forms myself. Business is business. I’m only saying that what my daddy did for favors I’ll either do for free or for fee.”

“Free,” Givens said.

“Oh, once or twice, should the spirit move me and I be inclined towards lopsided generosity. Or to attract your business. This first account, though, won’t run on credit. See, if we go back to kissing, I don’t get undressed without the money on the nightstand first, not for a first time.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem.”

“I wouldn’t have thought.”

“You’re risky,” Givens said, in the same level tone he’d said everything in so far, “and I don’t suppose I’d think much about trusting you, but if talking like that’s intelligence, you’re smart enough, maybe, to be an ace in the hole, and one of those never hurts. Even if it is the ace of spades. Unless,” he said, his eyes on the top button of Boyd’s shirt, “you find that offensive. Though I don’t really give a shit either way.”

“If you were running for office, Mr. Givens, you’d go to church on Sundays, wouldn’t you? Something nice and mainstream, Baptist maybe, given the area, though Methodist would do in a pinch.”

“I got into politics I’d have to shoot myself. But if I were going to win, I suppose I’d have to warm a pew now and then.”

Boyd unbuttoned his shirt enough for Givens to see the tattoo. “This would be cousin to that.”

Givens raised his eyebrows. “You went to hate like people go to church?”

“I went to church, too,” Boyd said, “but in Harlan, hate’s the more profitable venture, you’re looking to play to a crowd.”

He did the buttons up again. Anymore, he was quicker to get the buttons up than to get them down—whatever else his commandos were from time to time—soldiers or employees or loyal followers—what they were mostly was wearying, too young and too fervent, drinking down whatever he said without discrimination, like they’d swallow paint thinner as long as he offered it right.

Getting men like Devil or Dewey Crowe to back his plays wasn’t any kind of accomplishment, and their eyes on his, round and bright as puppies’, wasn’t any kind of praise. Their attention wasn’t Raylan Givens’s, given to him because he was of interest, it was attention given—he was starting to think, anyhow—because he was a sun they could orbit, but anything else would have done just as well, if he hadn’t been there.

And it was a dangerous game, anyway, playing with that much bottled-up poverty and shitkicker rage: one day, one of them would decide that he wouldn’t wait for Boyd’s word on what to target. Boyd had been a true enough believer for just a little while—enough to pay someone to shoot ink into his skin when it would take lasers and ready money to burn it out again—but it hadn’t been a foolishness he could sustain, and he didn’t think he wanted to be there and didn’t think he wanted to be responsible when the stakes in the game changed from money to blood. That wasn’t his inclination. No, it would be better—at least for now—to invest his time in Raylan Givens.

“It’s not a crowd I’m interested in now, though,” he said. “I’ll take an interest in whoever you’ve a mind for me to.”

“The other shit stops. I’m not mixing my business with Neo-Nazi fuckwit assholes.”

“There’s none I’d delegate to,” Boyd said. “But it’s business that’s over and done with, anyhow,” adding that as smoothly as though it was a conclusion he’d gotten to long ago and not just seconds before. When Boyd made up his mind, he made it up completely, and his bridges stayed burnt. There was no one in his crew who would stand up to take his place; they would trickle out and elsewhere, and be someone else’s problem, or else go back to cutting the occasional tire and picking the occasional fight, drunk, in Noble’s Holler, without being any concern of his. “You wouldn’t judge a man by his past, now, would you? Moving forward, we’ll be much better acquainted, just on our meeting here, wouldn’t you say?”

“You’re acting like it’s an audition.”

“It’s a job interview,” Boyd said. “Though I’m still waiting to hear the exact position.”

The name, he meant, of the man Givens wanted him to kill.

“I’d extend you a courtesy first. A practical one, though. From here on out, it’d be a little simpler if you’d call me Raylan.”

Boyd was disappointed by it: a first-name basis was the damp handshake of a different kind of man, one pretending there wasn’t a hill between them. “If you like.”

Raylan poured himself another drink and looked at the two fingers of Jim Beam in his glass before he said, “Arlo Givens.”

And Boyd finally blinked.

“You want me to kill your daddy.”

“Can’t be the first time in history someone’s wanted such a thing,” Raylan said, and Boyd didn’t know whether he meant that he couldn’t have been the first man to want Arlo Givens dead or that he wouldn’t have been the first son to turn against his father, but either way, he was likelier right than wrong. It didn’t put him any more at ease with the situation. Boyd was in some instances superstitious, and mistrusted patricide as somehow irreligious in a way that his own sins weren’t. There was, too, the cumbersome fact that he had loved his own father and lost him.

“I suppose not,” he said.

“I think we’ve stopped undressing, Mr. Crowder.”

“Well, it does tend to cloud the mood, Raylan,” he said, twisting the name like a knife, driving it in as far as he could. “It isn’t something I would have thought of, myself, but I suppose the rich really are different from the rest of us down below.”

“You think money has shit to do with it,” Raylan said, almost incredulously, almost—in some way Boyd groped after but couldn’t quite reach— _hurt_ , as though he had expected or at least hoped for some different reception.

_Poor little rich boy_ , Boyd Crowder thought, unsmiling, though not without, when he came right down upon it, at least the barest scraping of sorrow for him after all. Raylan Givens had lived the kind of life where he was hungry for someone, even Boyd, to give a damn that he’d suffered; there was an innocence to him in that way. He said, as gently as he could, “I suppose he laid hands on you a time or two, growing up,” though he doubted it was anything his own daddy hadn’t done to him. Boyd had never lacked for bruises, but he’d never lacked much for love, either, or assurance that he was chosen, and he was broad-minded enough to imagine that might have differed for Raylan.

“Do you need that?” Raylan said. “For it to be justified?”

A day full of surprises, then. “No. I suppose I do not.”

“I were to tell you he beat the living shit out of me, you’d see the point of it, I were to say he didn’t, you wouldn’t? I’m paying you, is the fucking point.”

“That it is.” He took a risk and poured the next round himself, since his hands were steadier than Raylan’s. “When do you want it done?”

Raylan looked at him then, eyes as unsteady as his hands for a moment, and Boyd almost said, “Hush,” as though Raylan were Bowman, young enough to still be scraping his knees on the pavement and needing someone to get the gravel out. He was fortunate enough to keep his mouth shut—it would do him no good to mistake Raylan Givens, with his armed in-house muscle, for someone who required much in the way of comforting, or would even tolerate it. He had spent too much time in the company of men who were broken to recognize one who was, however faulted, whole.

But Raylan was pleased with him, that was easy enough to see. “I’m away on business all next week. Something were to happen then, it wouldn’t go amiss.”

“That’s conspicuous,” Boyd said. “You being away.”

“You’d rather do it while I’m here? It’s too well-known I hate the son-of-a-bitch. I don’t want to sit through any questions.”

“They’d question you regardless, as you’re a man of means, more than capable of hiring someone to pull a trigger for you, as we can both testify—I’m sorry, poor choice of words. As we can both _ascertain_. And however nice a house may look from outside, there’s always a chance of someone pulling back the curtain to see a stranger walking up the next door’s drive.”

“You think someone will talk about you being here.”

“I think it’s a possibility I’d just as soon avoid, and only a man very foolish or very careful would invite his hire to do a murder when he’s less alibied than would be his wont.”

“You think Napier will place me somewhere in between?”

“I think you’re not foolish and that no one’s likely to mistake you for careful.”

Raylan smiled. “No one would mention you being here, Mr. Crowder. Anyone with eyes on this house wouldn’t lift a finger to stop Arlo from dying—they might come after me for something else, but not for that, and they wouldn’t talk to the sheriff over it, tell tales out of school.”

“Of course not,” Boyd said. “Talking to the sheriff’s the law-abiding thing to do, and as far up on the hill as we may be, we’re still in Harlan County—but blackmail is an altogether different thing. It’s best the question of your involvement not be raised at all. Take a quiet dinner somewhere alone, but leave a good tip, and _that’s_ the night I’ll kill your daddy.”

“You’re demanding,” Raylan said.

“It’s a fault in an independent contractor. You might have used your own man.”

“He doesn’t do that kind of work. Anyway, should it turn sour—”

“You’d rather me in prison than him. Now, that _is_ touching.” He wasn’t trying for sarcasm: he would rather, if he had a choice, work for a man who protected someone longer in his service than one that would disregard such loyalty. “It’s the one term I have, short of the money, on which count I’m sure you’ll make suitable arrangements. Do we have a deal, _Raylan_?”

“We do,” Raylan said.

They didn’t shake hands on it: this was Clover Hill, not the holler, and handshake deals here only took place between men who could meet safely over the golf course. Raylan Givens let him finish his drink before he left the house, tailed once more by the man in the cheap imitation of Raylan’s own suit, and that was all: Boyd drove back home.

It took him a week and a half to clear the church of his men—Devil was the most persistent of them, and at the end of it, he spat onto Boyd’s face and told him that all his talk was just another way to fuck all of them. That was how he’d put it—not _fuck them all over_ , but _fuck them_ , as though something unseemly, not unwanted but too uncaring, too rough, had happened between them.

“You talked me into and now you’re saying it was all bullshit,” Devil said. “All of it? Then why’d you do it to me, Boyd? Why’d you—shit, I hope they show you what it’s like, those Clover Hill sons-of-bitches, I hope they make you find it out, and I hope I see it.”

“That’s fine, son,” Boyd said, Devil’s spit warm on his face. No one had done that before to him, not in his life, and he didn’t know what to do about it: it took him a while to decide to wipe it away. “It happens, I won’t begrudge you it.”

Devil just looked at him, eyes dark, pupils blown wide like a man in shock—and Boyd had seen that, overseas, men bleeding out with their eyes black as night skies—and said, “Fuck you, Boyd,” and left.

Boyd stood there in the middle of the church for a long time afterwards, for some reason thinking of the way Raylan Givens’s hands had trembled when Boyd had asked him about his daddy. He said, into the hushed and holy silence: “I am not a good man,” and God accepted that as quietly as He had everything Boyd had done, it seemed, since his first perfect shot in Desert Storm had brought a body down like a sack full of stones.

He thought about Raylan Givens’s father, and the shape of that murder, this patricide-by-proxy, seemed over the next few days to bloom inside his head like a flower, taking up more and more room as it unfurled. When Raylan finally sent him a letter—Boyd admired that touch, as antiquated as it was, and as nearly-untraceable, with its lack of return address—to tell him the date, that blood-red thing inside his head seemed to be all there was of the world.

He dressed that night in dark colors, all somber funeral tones if not all black—there was no easier way to catch attention anywhere than going around dressed for your murder like you were Johnny Cash—and went again up Clover Hill. Raylan Givens lived on one side of it and his father lived on the other, mostly if not entirely alone. He was widowed from Raylan mother and divorced from Raylan’s aunt, which even Boyd remembered as something of a minor scandal—the marriage, rather than the divorce, as Clover Hill people allied and broke their alliances with a casualness the holler, where everything got tangled up in blood and feud, could only envy. Marrying your dead wife’s sister was too Old Testament for most of that crowd, although fucking her, Boyd supposed, would have been acceptable enough, as long as it happened at one of those tasteful key parties where everyone wore evening wear and drank champagne.

Arlo Givens was a man out of time and out of place, better-fitted to the holler than the hill, and it didn’t surprise Boyd had he was as unpopular with the one as he was with the other.

But Helen Givens, unconventional herself, had stayed married to her brother-in-law husband for only two years: she’d left Arlo when she’d been diagnosed with cancer, surely knowing that life was too short for this shit. She had lived, so far as Boyd recollected, but she had moved away, and that put her out of his mind.

Word was she still visited from time to time, unable to let either Arlo or Raylan go, too Kentucky for that in the end, after all, but Raylan had left no word of her presence here now, so he counted on Arlo rattling around that house of his all on his lonesome.

Boyd slipped in like nightfall, dead quiet, and found Arlo waiting for him: sitting in an easy chair, a shotgun over his legs, his hair—untrimmed for the most part—white and loose around his ears.

Boyd stopped breathing for a moment and then said, “I can see I haven’t surprised you, Mr. Givens.”

“You don’t look much like your daddy,” Arlo said.

“You don’t look much like your son.”

“I’d like to say there’s a good reason for that, but Frances always was the faithful type. So you met the little son-of-bitch personally?”

“He does business the right way,” Boyd said. “Do you mind if I sit down?”

Arlo smiled: it was a kind of reptilian smile, coolly appraising, drawn back into slightly shriveled cheeks, and for the first time, he understood something of why Raylan would rather the man be dead. It wouldn’t have been a smile to grow up with. “You go right on ahead, Boyd.”

“Why, thank you, Mr. Givens.” He sat, his own gun laid smoothly along his thigh. “I can’t imagine your son told you about our arrangement, so I’m curious.”

“I didn’t run half of Harlan through Bo Crowder for years without knowing what goes on below my own damned nose, boy. I know this place down to the rocks. And I know you, Boyd Crowder—that bullshit you ran out of that church until, what, a week ago? That was some clever shit—better than anything your daddy would have come up with. ‘Course, more dangerous, too. And what happened with your sister-in-law—”

“Ava’s not relevant to this,” Boyd said.

Arlo raised his eyebrows, his eyes gleaming in the low light of the room. “So you’re like your daddy after all, then. A little bit cowardly when it comes down to it. You know, Bo came to me before he went to prison, asking couldn’t I help him out just a little. Man almost cried, talking about his boys, how they needed him. Well, it was his own damn carelessness that was the trouble. It doesn’t do you any good, does it, to keep quiet about that girl?”

“It’s not under discussion here,” Boyd said levelly, “is all I’m saying.”

“Have it your way, then.”

There was silence between them.

_Hush_ , he had almost said to Raylan; Arlo Givens was not a man he would be tempted to hush, but he saw, even in the moonlight, the same restlessness about the hands, and felt brambles scratch at the inside of his chest. He didn’t know what it was about the world that made people such as them.

“What do you suggest we do?” Boyd asked quietly. “I don’t think you’re a man to call the law.”

“Suppose I pay you to kill my son.”

The stillness that followed was a glass that Boyd felt around but could bring himself to shatter, not with a word, because he could think of nothing adequate; he could fathom a father who would kill his son easier than he could fathom a son who would kill his father—he had known Bo Crowder very well, after all, and for all he believed his daddy had loved him, he had never been deceived as to the quality of that love, or the swiftness with which it could be withdrawn—but he realized now that he could not, as of yet, fathom one who would hire such a task out. Filicide should be paid for only in blood. Then, too, there was his loyalty to Raylan to think of; he had at least twenty thousand dollars of that and was honor-bound to repay it.

“I think I’d have to decline,” Boyd said finally, when there was nothing left but to say it.

Arlo chuckled. “Not even to say yes and get out of here alive? Damn, boy, but you’ve got balls.”

“It’s more practical than that. I’m not sure I’d convince you, and while I’m fine with dying with a lie in my mouth, the truth has already kept me on this earth a little longer than its cousin would have done. Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Go on ahead.”

“Much obliged.” He settled the gun more steadily against his leg, reached for the pack in his pocket, and lit up. The brief flame from the lighter gave him a better, though no more hopeful, look at Arlo Givens’s face. “Well, I reckon we’re at an impasse, Mr. Givens. I must confess, even I find it troublesome to kill a man after I’ve had a conversation with him.”

“Talk with him a little longer,” a voice said in the darkness, over Boyd’s shoulder. “You won’t find it troublesome then at all.”

“Raylan,” he said, and in the second it took for him to say it, he heard too many things in his voice to put himself at an even keel. Then the muzzle flash lit up the room, brisk as a clap, and a patch of darkness—that was all it was in the gloom—spread across Arlo Givens’s forehead. Boyd shoved himself back in the chair—it was all hard leather with no give, so the legs scraped across the floor, making his teeth click together. They came down on his tongue and the taste of blood licked up into his mouth as if on someone else’s lips.

“You can get up now,” Raylan said.

Boyd separated himself with some delicacy from the chair. His skin was sticking to the leather where his hand had started to sweat. The cigarette had fallen on the floor and he ground it out quickly with his boot heel. “If that was your plan, Raylan, you might have warned me.”

“No plan. It just seemed like something I should do myself. I didn’t count on him anticipating you, but he always did surprise me when it came to that kind of shit.” He turned on the lights and evaluated Boyd. “You might look a little more like a man who’s still alive.”

“You heard he tried to buy me into killing you?”

Raylan paused. “I heard you say no. That spared you the crack I was going to have about you being white as a sheet, but maybe that being more comfortable for you.”

Boyd came up with another cigarette and lit it again, trying hard to keep it in his fingers; he smoked until his hands straightened out again. “It seems you got that in under the wire anyhow.”

“Seems like,” Raylan said, not apologizing for it.

Boyd thought about Devil’s saliva warm on his face; Devil and poor stone-dumb Dewey Crowe setting fires in Noble’s Holler, last he heard, and Dewey out three teeth and a family out a home for it. He wouldn’t have asked for Raylan’s apology. He was impatient with regret, for the most part, but he was similarly impatient with denial. He knew the words that would come to someone’s mouth, describing him, and he wouldn’t battle them any.

“What are we doing to do?” Boyd said.

Raylan looked at him. Boyd didn’t have the words for how.

“You go home,” Raylan said, with what would have been kindness, in someone else, or a long time ago. “And you take the damn cigarette butt with you. Everyone knows me and Arlo weren’t on what you’d call good terms, so the story gets told that I stopped by, we had words, he pulled first, I shot him.”

“He pulled first with a shotgun sitting on his lap.”

“Nothing to be surprised about there,” Raylan said. “He was the kind of man to have one handy.” He rubbed his face. “You’ll still get your money, Mr. Crowder.”

“Boyd,” he said. What was in his throat felt like a stone. “As I don’t know whether I’d have lived through the night without you coming, a first-name basis seems only appropriate.”

“Boyd, then. I’ll call you. Unless I’m in a one-phone-call type of situation.”

“I don’t think so,” Boyd said quietly. “It seems to me that a man like you could get out of almost anything.”

He hadn’t meant it as an insult, but Raylan flinched, and he couldn’t think of how to mend things without making them worse. So he just stood, his hand on the doorknob he would wipe with his sleeve as he left—precaution never injured anyone—and waited to see what would happen. To see if Raylan would call him back, tell him to stay, or if he would have to walk down Clover Hill in the dark back to the lowlands where they both knew he belonged.


End file.
